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All this useful beauty | page 1, 2
Having ants eat away at Old Glory, and hanging it next to piss-ant sentiments (like "Sanitation's" Pat Buchanan quote calling the First Amendment "the last refuge of the modern scoundrel"), are obviously tactics meant to reposition Johns' flags with regard to contemporary politics. But it seems to me Johns' flags are doing just fine accomplishing this on their own. Did anyone notice that Johns sold the Metropolitan Museum his 1955 "White Flag" at the end of 1998, during President Clinton's impeachment trial? It didn't take a great leap of the imagination to read into it an American flag bled dry of color while the Senate was bleeding its taxpayers in the name of the Constitution.
Sarah Vowell Sarah Vowell's column appears on the Arts & Entertainment site every other Wednesday.
Who knows what appealed to the Whitney curatorial team about Vic Muniz's photo of Theodore Gericault's painting of "The Raft of the Medusa" rendered in Bosco chocolate sauce. It is smeared and it is brown. Perhaps the curators were temporarily nostalgic for grandeur, for a time when painting meant something, told stories, transformed acts of God into works of art. Once, describing Gericault's great shipwreck canvas, novelist Julian Barnes asked how catastrophe gets turned into art. He wrote, "We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for." Those words were ringing in my head when I came across a series of objects that are the wittiest, the most beautiful and the most disturbing pieces in either show, because the 19th century did not corner the market on calamity. At the design triennial, the Boym Design Studio's little "Disaster Buildings" are as pretty as they are dark. Miniature monuments in nickel, they call to mind metal souvenir trinkets of the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty. Constantin and Laurene Leon Boym's treasures, however, commemorate other, less romantic structures -- namely, the Unabomber's cabin, the Watergate complex, the World Trade Center and the reactors of Three Mile Island. Sites of terrorism, treason and disaster. And then there is the most disquieting structure of all, Oklahoma City's Murrah Building. It is cast after the bombing, the insides toppling in and gutted. Which is all the more gruesome considering that it is on sale in the museum gift shop. It is, after all, a paperweight, and undeniably heavy. What would it be like to live with these things, holding down stacks of notepaper and mail? Would the bills seem less dire if held in place by the shack where Ted Kaczynski constructed his murderous letter bombs? Maybe. The "Disaster Buildings" are beautiful and questionable, accessible and mysterious, petty and tragic all at once. In other words, they're doing what art was always supposed to do, and if they keep one's in basket from blowing out the window, well, that would be no disaster.
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